This volume explores the literary and visual cultures of modern Irish suburbia, and the historical, social, and aesthetic contexts in which these cultures have emerged.
Though there is an expanding body of criticism on suburban cultures in other Anglophone countries such as Britain and the United States, relatively little has been written on the suburbs in Irish literature and visual arts. 1 In spite of the physical existence of suburbia as a space between city and country with its own set of unique cultural and social identifiers, it is not always imagined as a culturally interesting place in its own right, or as a vantage point from which to explore the inner urban or the rural. However, although suburbia is sometimes negatively depicted in literary and visual culture as a place to be escaped from, contemporary sociological research on Irish suburbia bears out the strength of historical attachment to local forms of residential conglomerations. The work of Mary Corcoran, Jane Gray, and Michel Peillon, which informs several of the chapters in Imagining Irish Suburbia in Literature and Culture, has demonstrated that attachment to place is not only an important aspect of local Irish cultures, but that many residents of modern Irish suburbs also feel strong attachments to where they have chosen to live and to raise their families. These attachments are often more substantial than are popularly recognised within Anglophone cultures, particularly within Britain and America. Corcoran, Gray, and Peillon propose that two dominant models have been employed in the study of suburbia. The first model tends to stereotype the suburbs as dystopian places of drab conformism and personal alienation, a stereotype often repeated in artistic and media forms, while the second model employs a sceptical, and crucial, reappraisal of such stereotyping. 2 Imagining Irish Suburbia in Literature and Culture not only reflects the form of this debate but aims to advance it. The totality of this volume suggests that while Irish suburban experience is often conceived pejoratively by writers and artists, there are also many who register and valorise the imaginative possibilities of Irish suburbia and the meanings of its social and cultural life.
Imagining Irish Suburbia in Literature and Culture contains fourteen chapters. The first three establish key historical, sociological, and theoretical contexts for Irish suburban cultures. Ruth McManus begins the book with a concise overview of the evolution and development of Irish suburbia from the nineteenth century to the present, thus establishing a vital geo-historical frame of understanding for the chapters that follow. Although the development of Irish suburbia largely mirrors the American and British experience, McManus demonstrates that Irish suburbia has its own particular character and unique cultures. These cultures can be felicitously understood within the local context; Mary Corcoran in her chapter argues that, contrary to their representation as places of social alienation, the suburbs are actually sites where engaged civic cultures thrive, creating what she terms âsocial affiliationsâ. Although globalisation and technological advances increasingly appear to weaken attachments to the local, Corcoran argues that Irish suburbia remains a place of âmico-civicismâ where social participation is strong, binding, and important. Michael Croninâs chapter deepens McManusâs and Corcoranâs sense that Irish suburbia is a vibrant and socially creative space. He offers an incisive model of theorising suburban literary cultural forms, specifically in relation to Dublin. Considering works by artists of suburbia, such as James Joyce, Roddy Doyle, Paul Howard, and John Banville (among others), Cronin explores the suburbs in four different ways: as metonymic spaces (as opposed to metaphorical) that express the geo-spatial complexity of Dublin in contemporary writing and which âprovide anchor points of identificationâ in a fragmented city; as culturally rich spaces that can be illuminated through âmicrospectionâ; as places of multifarious intralingual subtleties that belie simplistic understandings of language-use; and, echoing Corcoran, historically as fertile places where ânew forms of relationships were being testedâ and âwhere new kinds of affinities were possibleâ that have given rise to a more liberal and tolerant Ireland.
Cronin demonstrates that there exist multiple Irish suburban cultures to explore, and that, contrary to its popular image, Irish suburbia contains within it an extraordinary number of productive cultures. This productivity is traced in aesthetic terms by Eoghan Smith and Simon Workman in their overview of Irish suburban literary and visual culture. Although by no means intended to be an exhaustive account, they argue that many Irish artists have been more attuned to the possibilities, and indeed, necessity, of writing out of and about Irish suburbia than has perhaps been recognised. In recent times, in particular, a significant body of literary and visual culture has developed in response to the property boom that helped drive the so-called âCeltic Tigerâ economy from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, and the fallout of the collapse of that economy. The rapid growth and subsequent crash of this economy were underpinned in a large part by mass suburban house-building projects; at the same time, many of the artists who engaged with the Celtic Tiger and the catastrophic fallout of the crash were themselves deeply invested in life in the suburbs. If Imagining Irish Suburbia in Literature and Culture has a strong focus on the period from the 1990s to the present day, it is because the rapid development of Irish suburbia during this time was fundamentally revealing and transformative of Irish culture, society and economic policy, the reverberations of which were and still are being registered by Irish artists across a variety of art forms.
Chapters by Liam Lanigan, Theresa Wray, Eamonn Jordan, and Catherine Kilcoyne are linked through their primary focus on literary engagements with Irish suburbia and in their shared sense that the Irish suburbs are crucial sites of cultural meaning as well as a distinctive index of socio-economic transformation. Lanigan focuses on the interrelations between geography, space, and identity in contemporary fictional representations of the south Dublin suburbs in the work of Barry McCrea, Kevin Power, and Justin Quinn. In his essay, he argues that the affluent and culturally powerful south Dublin suburbs have always had a particular importance in the Irish imagination, dating back to the nineteenth century. During the Celtic Tiger period, the apparent economic and cultural detachment of these suburbs not only from the rest of Ireland but also from the rest of Dublin became exacerbated in the public mind, albeit in complex and nuanced ways that Lanigan argues often ironically draws attention to this same sense of detachment as âillusoryâ. Echoing observations by McManus and Corcoran that Irish suburbia has its own set of characteristics, Wray considers the wider context of American and British representations and theories of suburbia, and asks important questions about the richness and validity of Irish suburbia as a space for female imagining and art, offering readings of writers such as Elizabeth Bowen, Maeve Brennan, Maeve Binchy, Anne Enright, Patricia Scanlan, Mary Morrissy, and ĂilĂs NĂ Dhuibhne. Eamonn Jordan comprehensively surveys contemporary Irish plays set in urban and suburban Dublin during the Celtic Tiger and Post-Celtic Tiger periods. His chapter considers how Irish dramatists grappled with the profound changes that the new economic paradigm was bringing about, and he explores in particular representations of class and of inter-class relationships in contemporary Irish theatre. Jordan additionally points out, echoing Wray, that the formation of identity through personal and sexual relationships is a recurrent theme of Irish suburban writing. The final contribution on suburbia in Irish literature, by Catherine Kilcoyne, examines how the work of Irish poets W.B. Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh, Eavan Boland, Derek Mahon, and Medbh McGuckian track and constitute the plethoric meanings of Irish suburbia in various locations and through different historical phases.
Engagement by Irish artists with suburbia, particularly in recent times, is also prevalent in other forms of Irish culture. Chapters by Ruth Barton, Tracy Fahey, John OâFlynn, and Justin Carville address the portrayal of contemporary suburbia within forms of visual and musical culture and offer analyses of its manifestation in Irish film, art, photography, and music. Like Lanigan and, to an extent, Jordan, Barton examines how recent renderings of Irish suburbia critique the assumptions and attitudes of the middle classes of south Dublin. Focusing specifically on recent films by John Boorman, Lenny Abrahamson, and Kirsten Sheridan, Barton examines how membership of the middle classes in these films is defined by house-ownership and cultural affiliation to the south Dublin suburbs, to which is attached privilege. Yet this class privilege, which habitually appears to be linked to specific suburban detachment and affluence, Barton argues, is not one that is always depicted in positive terms in contemporary Irish cinema, suggesting that Irish filmmakers were alert to the more destructive aspects of the Celtic Tiger economy. However, there is a sense that in the films considered here, the approach to middle class Irish suburban culture is not always nuanced, with film-makers preferring judgmental excoriation to more circumspect reflection.
Barton and Jordan emphasise the importance of âhomeâ in the Irish suburban imagination. The personal obsession with home-ownership became something of a national nightmare after the collapse of the Celtic Tiger economy, as the aftermath of the crash saw the landscape blighted by unfinished and vacant housing estates that have since become known as âghost estatesâ. In her chapter, Tracy Fahey interprets the powerful nexus of Gothic aesthetics and the image of the ghost estate/vacant home in recent Irish art practice. Discussing several modes of visual art in the work of a number of contemporary artists, she demonstrates the remarkable prevalence and malleability of the ghost estate as signifier of Irish economic collapse along with the enduring cultural attachment of Irish people to âhomeâ.
Although suburbanisation is a modern phenomenon, Faheyâs uncovering of older Irish attachments to âhomeâ in contemporary art practice reflects the capacity of Irish cultural experience to survive by translating itself into new and modified forms. In his overview of musical happenings in suburban Dublin, John OâFlynn explores the visibility and the âhiddennessâ of the suburbs in contemporary Irish musical culture, which he argues demonstrates continuity with older folk traditions. In one sense, the suburbs are highly visible in popular music; not only are many popular Dublin musicians suburbanites, but suburban experience is reflected in the form and content of their music. Yet, as Corcoran, Cronin, and Smith and Workman also allude to in their essays, OâFlynn suggests the hiddenness of the suburbs is partly caused by the discursive boundaries around suburbia, so that the fertility of suburban culture is often obscured.
The essays by Fahey and OâFlynn reveal something of the ambiguous relationship that Irish artists often have with suburbia; on the one hand, suburbs are formative spaces for identity and creative endeavour; on the other, they are not always openly and consciously celebrated. This latter reluctance may in part be attributed to inherited discourses about the imaginative limitations of the suburb. It may also be related to the physicality of suburbia, which by nature involves topographical and ecological upheaval. Faheyâs consideration of ghost estates draws attention to changes in the physical landscape wrought by suburbanisation, something which is echoed by Justin Carvilleâs exploration of photographic representations of Irish suburbia. Carville uses the concept of terrain vague to offer new insights into the aesthetics of Irish suburban photography. He suggests that recent Irish photographic practices have undergone a âtopographical turnâ in which landscape is not simply documented; instead, Irish photography has played a vital role in concentrating the eye on the cultural and economic forces that actively changed Ireland, and to which there has been much political and public blindness.
Like many of the other authors in the collection, Carville is focused on the striking transformations of landscape that occurred during the mass suburbanisation of Ireland during the Celtic Tiger years. His chapter provides a bridge towards the subsequent contributions by photographers Mark Curran and Anthony Haughey, who document how photography has a unique power to catalogue such transformations. Although both academics in their own right, these two essays by Curran and Haughey offer comparable artistsâ responses to the recent development of Irish suburbia, disclosing the process and rationale of individual photographic artworks engaged with the evolving suburban spaces of modern Ireland. Curran outlines his interest as a photographer in the suburban developments of south County Dublin, and, like many others, delineates the economic and political forces that drove the radical transformation of Ireland during the Celtic Tiger through the expansion of the built environment. Haughey, like Fahey, is interested in the phenomenon of the ghost estate, and he documents his own artistic process in photographing ghost estates, while also considering the politics of exhibition of contemporary suburbia. In this sense, both Curran and Haughey, along with others in Imagining Irish Suburbia in Literature and Culture, see Irish artistic engagement with suburbanisation in dialectical terms, as acts which are both critical but aesthetically productive, both sceptical and yet rich in artistic possibility.
Haugheyâs and Curranâs work also pertains to the deficieny and malfunction within Irelandâs housing sector as it is currently consituted; as this volume of essays goes to publication, Ireland is in the grip of a housing crisis of striking scale and complexity, which has resulted in steep increases in the numbers of homeless and families in emergency provision. The stateâs over-reliance on the private sector and flawed social housing policies have resulted in house price inflation, sharp, sometimes exorbitant, increases in rents, and a dearth of new housing stock. And though Curranâs and Haugheyâs work is particularly focused on these issues, the other chapters in this volume (despite variances in theoretical approach, historical focus, and thematic preoccupation) also elucidate some aspect of the forms of political economy and cultural formation that have led to the current calamity in housing. In toto, this variegated field of analysis provides a penetrating diagnosis of the systemic failures in housing provision, which were engendered by the myopic and misguided perspectives (both recent and historic) of the Irish polity and its cultures. Yet these essays not only anatomise the causes of these socio-political failures, they also hone and enrich the language through which solutions to the current crisis in housing can be articulated and implemented. It is clear that suburbia will prove a crucial site in this process and become a locus for how Irish society re-imagines itself into the future.
Notes
- 1.See for example Martin Dines, Gay Suburban Narratives in American and British Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Sarah Edwards and Jonathan Charley, eds, Writing the Modern City: Literature, Architecture, Modernity (London: Routledge, 2011); Jo Gill, The Poetics of the American Suburbs (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Lynne Hapgood, Margins of Desire: The Suburbs in Fiction and Culture, 1880â1925 (Manchester University Press, 2005); Catherine Jurca, White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Bernice M. Murphy, The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Nathanael OâReilly, Exploring Suburbia: The Suburbs in the Contemporary Australian Novel (Amherst, NY: Teneo Press, 2012); Ged Pope, Reading Londonâs Suburbs: From Charles Dickens to Zadie Smith (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Roger Webster, ed., Expanding Suburbia: Reviewing Suburban Narratives (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000).
- 2.Mary P. Corcoran, Jane Gray, and Michael Peillon, Suburban Affiliations: Social ...